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Ru'a [الرؤى visions]
videos & texts
An intersection between western criticism and the islam rhizome
To deconstruct the media monotype imposed on islamic realities
A reflection on the image in its relationship with the dream and visionary and on the images ability to project reality
.....
This
is an open research project about contemporary visions related to
Islamic culture (*).
The intention of this journey is not to offer a panoramic vision, or
give information on what is occurring in such a vast and complex
field, but to delve into certain intersection points between
different traditions, their mechanisms of reality, conflicts of imaginaries (1) and, ultimately, the notion of vision itself.
Visions in videos (2) , texts and meetings that show absent presences (that which doesn’t yet exist, but whose condition of possibility is being anticipated), realities that are unknown or distorted by the pressure of the evident, by the veil of images and stereotypes constructed by the urgency of an otherness, and from which artistic creation often cannot escape either.
Visions
aware that in that otherness one’s own identity is at stake, the
knowledge of the ‘other’ becomes a condition of transformation
and the possibility of opening up one’s own knowledge.
Visions
on key devices
for the construction of reality: the notion of vision and the
visible, of the real and the imaginary, but also social devices such
as interior and exterior space, private and public, gender and
transgender; or devices of political power such as nation, borders
and the various mechanisms for exclusion or seclusion of the ‘other’.
Visions
with special attention to the contemporary intersections between
Western critical thought and Islam’s rhizome.
In this sense Ru’a wants to delve specially in the
intersection related to the concept of vision and what is at stake
there. Faced with a dominant view that insists on the proliferation
and banalisation of the image, the Islamic tradition opted for an
iconoclastic pulsation in which the imaginary is not the counterpoint
of the real. For Ru’a this means opening a third space, a field of
research beyond the initial terms of the project.
Visions
of a culture
that is experiencing the tension between its own rhizomatic reality
and the pressure to implant a version of the global model.
…
Ru'a
[الرؤى
visions]
appeared as a rhizome in OVNI (Observatory Archives) [www.desorg.org]
[consequently it shares its main intention with it: to facilitate a
critique of contemporary culture and society using various strategies
such as video, independent documentaries and archaeology of the mass
media].
In
the context of our city (Barcelona) and country, Visions
brings us closer to some of the largest migrant communities in the
city, from Maghreb, Senegal and Pakistan, and helps us understand
that their flux is fundamentally a flux of knowledge.
The screenings, meetings and eventually
archive-installation will be held in different independent spaces in
the city, as well as MACBA. The blog (ru-a.org) is defined as a space
for publication, diffusion and commentary of the texts and articles
that will be included, as well as an archive and virtual table for
meeting and working.
…
Video
Visions through a hybrid medium of independent
production such as video, outside the large commercial and
institutional productions; a medium that, by its very nature, is
closer to the social, community orientated and subjective
micro-cosmos than to the ‘satellite’ vision or audiovisual fast
food.
The
old catalyst and symbolic role that the metropolis played in the days
of colonialism has been played since the mid-twentieth century by the
mass media and the entertainment industry: consumer cinema and, more
recently, video games. These media not only generate a homogenisation
of certain levels of conscience, constructing a ‘reality-news’
that anaesthetises all critical sense, but also construct an
imaginary – one’s own or others’ – that is monumental,
homogenous and exclusive. A spectacular representation, since ‘when
the real world is transformed into mere images, mere images become
real beings’.(3)
In
his interview ‘In the Shadow of the West’, Edward Said revealed
the sinister side of representation: ‘The act of representing (and
hence reducing) others, almost always involves violence of some sort
to the subject of the representation, as well as a contrast between
the violence of the act of representing something and the calm
exterior of the representation itself, the image – verbal, visual,
or otherwise – of the subject. Whether you call it a spectacular
image, or an exotic image, or a scholarly representation, there is
always this paradoxical contrast between the surface, which seems to
be in control, and the process that produces it, which inevitably
involves some degree of violence, decontextualization,
miniaturization, etc. The action or process of representing implies
control, it implies accumulation, it implies confinement, it implies
a certain kind of estrangement or disorientation on the part of the
one representing.’(4)
The
hyper-development of consumer audiovisual technology has led to a new
and exponential banalisation of the image, a saturation of controlled
visual stimuli and a spectacular veil covering the realities of
others. But it has also made video more accessible as an almost
everyday medium, reflecting on the realities we live or of which we
dream, thus turning into an autonomous medium for the creation of
personal imaginaries, and facilitating the appearance of an
independent visual discourse, and therefore access to the rhizomatic
diffusion of non-clonal visions.
Hence the importance, not only social and cultural but
also personal, of constructing one’s own imaginary, since it is
reality itself that is at stake here. In their disparity, the
selected videos link the real to the dream world, the communal to the
personal, the others to us, beyond any supposed limits, beyond the
fragile, ephemeral or polyphonic visions.
According
to that logic, we include authors from different backgrounds: those
who produce in their own country, those who have emigrated to Europe
or America, and those who, coming from other contexts and countries,
have decided – as a vital option or as a critique – to submerge
themselves in that other culture or establish a dialogue with it. We
believe that this disparity of situations can enrich this reflection,
help to better understand the complexity of tensions at stake and
provide more open keys of approximation.
…
A
shared characteristic: to use video and text as an instrument of
analysis, of critique of the silenced realities of a particularly
conflictive contemporaneity, but also of introspection and
exploration of intimacy. These are works that move freely between
genres – video, essay, independent documentary – in order to
understand the relations between individuals and the community,
questions of gender, ethnocentricity, neo-colonialism, the phenomena
of migration and media hostility, from the point of view of specific
bases with shared elements, but also from the point of view of
‘otherness’, an indispensable instrument of self-critique that is
becoming more and more necessary for the so called ‘Western
imaginary’.
abu ali 2013
…
The
name Ru'a
[الرؤى
visions]
does not indicate a closed territory and culture, assuming that were
possible, but rather a rhizomatic flux, a current of extremely
complex interrelations and cross-references where the Islamic –
with all its cultural, anthropological and historical derivations –
occupies a common place.
- Marc Augé, La Guerre des Rêves, exercices d'ethno-fiction. Editions du Seuil, 1997.
- Using various strategies: video, independent documentaries and archaeology of the mass media.
- Guy Debord, la Société du Spectacle. Editions Buchet-Chastel, 1967
- Edward Said, In the Shadow of the West. Interview with Jonathan Crary and Phil Mariani, WEDGE, 1985.
